Background and Context
In the spring of 1944 Patton was in England with an army that would not land on D-Day. The previous August he had slapped two hospitalized soldiers in Sicily, and Eisenhower had kept him out of combat command since. Now he had the Third Army, which would follow the invasion into France, and in the meantime the Allies were using his reputation as bait, letting the Germans believe he would lead a landing at Calais. He spent those weeks visiting his divisions and giving each a version of the same rough, funny, profane speech. Most of the men listening had never been in combat. The line was his way of telling them what they were there for.
Interpretation
"Dying for your country" is the language of memorials and recruiting posters, where a soldier's death is the highest thing he can give. Patton takes the phrase and hands the dying to the enemy. The dead, in his arithmetic, have won nothing. A soldier's job is to win, which means staying alive and doing the killing.
It also points the soldier's attention outward, at the enemy, the ground in front of him, and the next objective. That was the kind of soldier Patton wanted walking into France.
The profanity is part of the message. Patton spoke to the ranks in their own language, and a joke about the other side got a laugh out of a crowd of frightened men, which a solemn speech about sacrifice would not have done.
Current Relevance
Modern armies have taken the first half of the line more seriously than Patton could afford to. Body armor, medical evacuation measured in minutes, and a strong political aversion to casualties all put "don't die" near the top of the plan.
The second half has gone further still. Drones and long-range missiles let a country make the other side die at almost no risk to its own soldiers, which is the line fulfilled to the letter. Many people find that result troubling rather than satisfying. When one side stops risking anything, war starts to look less like a contest and more like a one-way decision, and that raises questions about restraint that Patton's formula never had to face.
Impact and Legacy
The 1970 film Patton opens with George C. Scott, alone in front of an enormous American flag, delivering a cleaned-up version of this speech, and this line comes first. The scene fixed the popular image of Patton as a profane, theatrical, ruthlessly practical commander, and it's how most people have heard the line since. Scott won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the role and refused it.
Inside the military the line survives as a blunt statement of the aggressive, offense-minded spirit Patton spent his career preaching, and it's still quoted to young soldiers for the reason he first said it: to make clear that their deaths are not what's being asked for.
Contrasting Views or Controversies
Coming from a general, the promise has a hollow side. Commanders decide where their men will be when the shooting starts, and many of the soldiers who heard this speech died in France that summer and fall anyway. Telling them their job was not to die could not keep them alive, and a critic can fairly say the joke made a real risk sound smaller than it was.
Patton didn't hold this view consistently himself. In other moods he wrote of death in battle as a fitting end for a professional soldier, so the line may say more about what a nervous audience needed to hear than about his settled belief.
Others object on moral grounds. The line treats the enemy soldier's death as the goal, stated with relish. Soldiers in a war like this one did have to kill, but making the killing funny can make it easier to do carelessly.
Practical Application
- Individual: facing something frightening, put your attention on what you're trying to accomplish rather than on what you might lose. Attention on the goal is attention you can use.
- Organizational: services that send people into real danger — fire departments, rescue crews, bomb squads — can honor the ones who died and still build everything around the next crew coming back: training, equipment, staffing, and the authority to call off an attempt.
- Civic: the decision to go to war belongs where the law puts it. The fewer of its own soldiers a war costs a country, the more of the restraining work has to be done by the formal checks — a declaration, a vote, a deadline — and the less can be left to public grief.
Background on the Author
George Smith Patton Jr. (1885–1945) was an American general and one of the best-known Allied field commanders of the Second World War. He was born in San Gabriel, California, into a family with a long military tradition; his grandfather, a Confederate colonel, was killed in the Civil War. He graduated from West Point in 1909. Wounded in the Meuse-Argonne offensive in 1918 while leading tanks into battle, he came out of that war a colonel and a believer in armor. In 1943 he commanded in Tunisia and then Sicily, where the slapping incidents nearly ended his career. He went on to command the Third Army across France and into Germany in 1944–45. He died in December 1945 in Heidelberg, Germany, from injuries suffered in a car accident.